Apple's iPhone 3.0 Software update went live Wednesday at around 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. After a few hours of reviewing its flagship features, I can report that all - well, most - seems to be in order.
After a half-hour download of its 230.1MB bulk over a sputtering DSL connection, I fired up the installation process. …

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A step in the right direction

Installed the update without a problem, and the new features are nice but somewhat belated. But bluetooth is still far to crippled for my liking - I still can't sync my iphone with my macbook unless I use a USB cable. Am I just being dumb?

I'm also pissed off with O2 for expecting me to pay an extra £14 a month to enable tethering. I'm already paying for "unlimited" data. I just want to connect a satnav to get traffic updates.

You can't subscribe to a subscription. You merely need to subscribe to the calendar again on your iPhone. Right click on the subscribed calendar in your desktop, click "Copy URL", save it as a note in Mail, or email it to yourself. Open up the note or email on your phone, click the link, confirm when it asks if you want to subscribe. Done.

>Why can't I click on the location in a Calendar event and have it bring up the location in the Map??

Dunno, but you can cut and paste it into Maps...

>Why can't I get preview messages for emails when the phone is locked in the same way that I do with text messages?

I would hazard a guess that it's because texts are plain text, and emails could be anything. How will they offer a preview of a mail that consists of links to images on a seperate server? All you would see if the text at the top of most mails that says "If you cannot read this mail, ....." etc.

>Why do I still have to go through that stupid system logging into O2's website with a code to view incoming picture messages? Shouldn't they just come straight to my iPhone now?

Text "mms" to 1010 to setup the feature on your account, presuming you already have a text bundle on contract. Then they will show in messages like they should.

>All in all, LAME.

All in all, do some homework before complaining, you don't have a leg to stand on.

I don't understand...

why application vendors failing to update applications after months of being told about an update to the iPhone OS is the app devs fault, when hardware vendors failing to update drivers after months of being told about Vista is Microsoft's fault.

Also:

"The iPhone may not tick all of your feature bloat, sorry, boxes ticked, but it doesn't need to. It does what it does really well, certainly better than the two HTC devices that I have owned - build quality is an order of magnitude greater on the iPhone too. Generally, if there is a missing feature you'll find that there's an app for that. Lots of them a free too."

I would have thought that MMS was a pretty straightforward feature. Welcome to the picture messaging revolution! In other news, Blur and Oasis battling it out to top the charts!

Seriously, I think the iPhone is actually a contender as a phone now. It's still not perfect, but it's a lot closer to the baseline for smartphones, and actually makes it (maybe) worthwhile getting one. All that needs to happen now is for the stupid prices to come down.

Not too bad

I run an original UK O2 18 month old iPhone. Jailbreaked with Pwnage tool and unlocked and used on Orange PAYGO. I decided to do a wipe and Restore to 2.2.1 and then rejailbreak so that I was starting afresh to do the OS 3.0 update.

I updated (not restored) and it stayed unlocked and activated, but obviously jailbreak is lost until the new version of Pwnage tool is released.

No MMS option though (sending or receiving), not sure if this is Orange or because it's not the G3 model. Location services seems to have broken in apps such as Twitterific and Maps. "The location could not be determined"

@Dan Wilkinson

> Missing, it's the last glaring omission for me, however the App store has several dozen alternatives, many with free over the air syncing ALA MobileMe.

Great. So I pay loads for MobileMe and now have to pay even more for a separate set of applications and syncing systems that I must keep maintained on my iPhone and Macs. No thanks.

> >Why the hell can't I sync Notes on my iPhone to Notes on my Mac and vice versa? Utterly stupid having two different systems which don't talk to each other.

> Because you're being dumb? It's all there. Are you looking at Stickies on your desktop, not Notes in mail or something?

How am I being 'dumb'? I have notes in Apple Mail. I have notes in Notes on my iPhone. There is no overlap between the two. They are completely separate systems. There is no facility in MobileMe to sync these two things to each other. There ought to be.

> You can't subscribe to a subscription. You merely need to subscribe to the calendar again on your iPhone. Right click on the subscribed calendar in your desktop, click "Copy URL", save it as a note in Mail, or email it to yourself. Open up the note or email on your phone, click the link, confirm when it asks if you want to subscribe. Done.

MobileMe syncs my subscribed calendars between my Macs so clearly it could also do it to my iPhone. But it doesn't. Which is poor. I shouldn't have to do all this manually.

> >Why can't I click on the location in a Calendar event and have it bring up the location in the Map??

> Dunno, but you can cut and paste it into Maps...

Not the same thing.

> >Why can't I get preview messages for emails when the phone is locked in the same way that I do with text messages?

> I would hazard a guess that it's because texts are plain text, and emails could be anything. How will they offer a preview of a mail that consists of links to images on a seperate server? All you would see if the text at the top of most mails that says "If you cannot read this mail, ....." etc.

When I get a text message it says 'text from FOO'. All I want is a similar thing that tells me I have an email from FOO without having to unlock my iPhone and go into Mail to see who the new mail is from. It really wouldn't be hard to add such an obviously desirable option.

> >Why do I still have to go through that stupid system logging into O2's website with a code to view incoming picture messages? Shouldn't they just come straight to my iPhone now?

> Text "mms" to 1010 to setup the feature on your account, presuming you already have a text bundle on contract. Then they will show in messages like they should.

Yes, I found that earlier. It should have happened automatically, but didn't.

> All in all, do some homework before complaining, you don't have a leg to stand on.

As so it continues...

@Anonymous Coward Posted Thursday 18th June 2009 12:26 GMT

Probably not, but it does sound like you are astroturfing a bit... Here an outrageous idea. Google it. The notes thing is frustrating - but there's and app for that. Evernote - it's free too! As for calendar problems - go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, select MobileMe under accounts, then MAKE SURE IT'S TURNED ON. It works for everyone else. Not executing this simple set of instructions is poor. Does you mummy still hold your hand when you cross the road?

@Shakje - Not missed MMS one bit. Never used it on my other handsets. If I want to send someone a picture, I use email, as I've yet to see a camera on a phone that worth using. I think *that* was the point. It wasn't so much forgotten or not implemented due to inability to code it, rather it was deemed surpluses to requirements by the engineers it was left out by design. Apple have obviously listened to the complaints and acted accordingly. I find it funny that you mock iPhone for being behind, yet WinMo devices STILL can't retain data if they lose battery power (and I mean EVERYTHING) and STILL need a stylus! (On an historical pedancy note, the whole Blur v Oasis thing happened in the summer of 1995, possibly whilst you were wearing nappies - and at least 7 years before commercially available MMS enabled phones - Eminem and Badly Drawn Boy would have been more accurate). I guess it depends on your priorities, eh? I won't pretend the device is perfect - but it shit's on the Blackberry and 2 Windows Mobile devices I've owned. I also note that Nokia is trumpeting the N97's ability to enter text messages using the 'traditional' number pad method. Nice.

@ Him @ You @ Me etc

>Great. So I pay loads for MobileMe and now have to pay even more for a separate set of applications and syncing systems that I must keep maintained on my iPhone and Macs. No thanks.

There are free ones, there are (very) expensive ones, there are ones in the middle. There are ones that provide replacement desktop task management software, there are ones that integrate into your existing data stores. Choose. I don't think you will see a native sync until the desktop side of things receives a significant bump in usefulness, maybe with Snow Leopard.

>How am I being 'dumb'? I have notes in Apple Mail. I have notes in Notes on my iPhone. There is no overlap between the two. They are completely separate systems. There is no facility in MobileMe to sync these two things to each other. There ought to be.

You didn't mention MobileMe, just that they wouldn't sync. They do, mine are synced anyway, and not through manual intervention. It may have done it over USB during the upgrade and associated fiddling whilst cabled up, but the point is that they do sync. Maybe OTA sync would be nice, but it's not as important as emails and calendars.

>MobileMe syncs my subscribed calendars between my Macs so clearly it could also do it to my iPhone. But it doesn't. Which is poor. I shouldn't have to do all this manually.

It would be better to have it let you pick and choose to have it done for you, but it's not a huge job to setup the initial config yourself. No worse then inputting your MobileMe settings in the first pace, in fact easier as it just requires you to click on a URL link.

>Not the same thing.

That sort of behaviour works from many other areas like email, so I'm sure it will come in a future update.

> When I get a text message it says 'text from FOO'. All I want is a similar thing that tells me I have an email from FOO without having to unlock my iPhone and go into Mail to see who the new mail is from. It really wouldn't be hard to add such an obviously desirable option.

It doesn't just do that tho does it, it previews the contents also, so it's not exactly like for like. Have you requested this as a feature? I'm not sure having to acknowledge email notifications for every email I get is desirable at all. Maybe a choice would be good.

>Yes, I found that earlier. It should have happened automatically, but didn't.

Actually for many people it did happen automatically, but you could jump the queue by requesting is manually. I reckon that O2 had a good couple of million accounts to make such ammendments to.

>Steady on, Dan. Do you work for Apple or something?

No, although I wouldn't be averse to the idea.

This is potentially the 2nd entirely free OS update that you have had on your phone. You've complained and called it lame because it doesn't have a few features that it never said it would have anyway, all of which are fairly minor (in my opinion) things, like slightly altered email notification, OTA notes syncing, and ToDo/Calendar syncing.

Half of these are MobileMe specific issues, and would mean nothing to people who don't have that anyway. All of them have or will have workarounds via other apps. Maybe they will update MM in a few weeks to support a few more features? Perhaps they didn't want to bite off more than they could chew this year?

You've utterly ignored all the new features you DO have (with the exception of MMS, which you still had a sowner on because you had to type a 3 character text to initialise), and pronounced it lame because it doesn't do things that you want.

Interestingly enough...

...the new finder feature is also finding and happily displaying emails that I deleted over four months ago, had removed from trash, and also do not exist on either the server or my desktop unit. Quite how it's achieving this feat without lying to me that a mail has been deleted is beyond me.

@Danny Thompson

As someone who carries both, I feel I am more qualified than "fan boys" of either kind to comment. I'm NOT looking for Apple to make a Blackberry or for RIM to make an iPhone - different tools for different people/uses/tastes.

Just to me - like all things Apple - the hype surrounding this "upgrade" was far, far out of proportion to the reality of the upgrade.

@Mac Phreak (again...)

"I find it funny that you mock iPhone for being behind, yet WinMo devices STILL can't retain data if they lose battery power (and I mean EVERYTHING)"

I find it funny that someone who's so quick to criticise a fellow iPhone user for failing to check their facts before criticising the beloved device, fails to check their own facts before attempting to play the superiority card over Windows Mobile. Google for "windows mobile persistent storage", then come back and explain to us how WinMo devices STILL lose EVERYTHING if they lose power...

@Mac Phreak

I'm another WinMo user (HTC Touch Pro), who also has access to an iPhone 3G (when my wife isn't playing Peggle on it...), and I think I've spent long enough using both to have a realistic (as opposed to fanboi-blinkered) appreciation of the pros and cons of each.

"So what you are trying to tell me is that your Touch is better that my iPhone? You are wrong. I owned a HTC Touch. It was shit. Anything that requires a stylus to operate is shit."

That all depends on what you want to be able to do with the device. If you just want to quickly select something, then requiring a stylus IS bad, but even without the full HTC skin I can still place or answer calls and read SMSs without going anywhere near the stylus (and my fingers are far from being stylus-like in their dimensions). I could also write stylus-free SMSs too if that was something I really needed to do. Certain fiddly websites aside, I also do all my web browsing without needing the stylus. So to suggest that WinMo *requires* a stylus is a bit disingenuous. It may work better with one than without, and there may be some things that are a bit too fiddly to achieve without it unless you've got good aim with a sharp fingernail or the patience of several saints, but there's nothing about either the hardware or software that makes the stylus mandatory.

Now, on the other hand, the fact that WinMo devices do work with styluses (stylii?) means that, in addition to finger-driven apps with correspondingly chunky UIs, WinMo can also be used for apps where greater accuracy/resolution is required or desirable, without the need for any work-arounds like temporarily zooming into the general area of selection. I do like the responsiveness of the iPhone screen compared to the TouchPro, when both are being prodded with a fingertip, but I'm happy to live with the slightly lower fingertip-responsiveness given that the stylus is always ready and waiting for those times when I'd rather have higher accuracy than higher responsiveness.

"On the iPhone, copy and paste is implemented brilliantly and works really well between apps, extremely intuative"

Whereas on WinMo it's... what, exactly? I highlight the text to be copied, hold down the stylus/fingertip until the context menu pops-up, and select Copy. Move to where the text needs to be pasted, touch and hold, select Paste, and there you are. Alternatively, many apps will also let you select Cut/Copy/Paste from the app menu, if you're so pressed for time that you can't wait for the pop-up menu to appear.

Is that really any less intuitive than the way iPhone3.0 behaves? Perhaps it is if you're coming to the iPhone from a non-computing background, but to anyone with even the remotest experience with a computer, the WinMo approach isn't going to take them by surprise or leave them wondering how to achieve it.

"Signal strength is better than the Touch too."

I presume you were testing both phones at the same time, in the same location, and on the same network? If not, then I'm not sure you've got sufficient data to be able to make such a definitive statement. Some days in some locations I get better reception on my TouchPro (with a T-Mobile sim) than my wife does on her O2 iPhone, some days in some locations it's the other way around. Neither phone seems to have any obvious advantage over the other as far as overall signal reception is concerned.

"As for 'multitasking' (obviously this is to be the new no copy & paste/mms bête noir of the Nokia/WinMo fanboi's), answer me this. If you can only do one thing at a time on a device, why allow it to run multiple apps that slow it down and drain power?"

Umm, how about being able to play music in the background whilst you browse a website, compose a SMS, twiddle with an Excel spreadsheet etc. etc.? Or how about being able to kick off the delivery of a large MMS/email and then go do something else without having to wait for the message to be sent? The advantage of WinMo here is that you as the user decide which apps to multitask, rather than being limited by what the OS allows you to stick in the background.

"If an app needs to chug away in the back ground, I'd argue that it's been poorly written!"

I'd argue that it's been well written if it's able to do what you asked it to do without needing your constant attention... There's no excuse for an app chewing up processing cycles if it's not doing anything worthwhile (i.e. busy-waiting) - that IS shoddy programming for sure - but to suggest that apps should only run if they've got UI focus is simply ludicrous. I left the world of non-multitasked systems behind over 20 years ago when I bought my first Amiga, and I've no desire to return to it, not even on a pocket-sized device.

"Ultimately, the reason why WinMo fails is due to it trying to be a mobile computer, rather than being a PDA. It one of the reasons why it didn't take off *as* a PDA."

And that's precisely why I love it. Sure, I've also got access to a netbook and three laptops if I want to do some heavy-duty mobile computing (or run something that isn't available on WinMo), but they all suffer from the disadvantage of not being within arms-reach at all times. My TouchPro on the other hand is available 24/7, and gives me the ability to do a lot of stuff as and when I have the time/inclination to do so, rather than having to postpone it until I'm in the vicinity of one of my PCs. It's horses for courses, some people don't want/need all that power in a handheld device, some do, and I for one am very pleased we have the choice.

"Generally, if there is a missing feature you'll find that there's an app for that. Lots of them a free too."

Whilst iPhone apps might be easier to find thanks to the single-source AppStore, I suspect there are more WinMo apps available, with just as many of them being freebies too. And unlike the iPhone, my TouchPro doesn't care where the apps come from or if they've received the Microsoft seal of approval.

One other advantage of WinMo over iPhone - I don't need to infect my PC with iTunes.

"How much are much are Microsoft paying you astroturfers these days? They must be scraping the barrel a bit these days though. It would appear that you can't be bothered to find a spec sheet so you can tell me what features are 'better' implemented in Windows Mobile."

If only Microsoft were paying me to be nice about WinMo... Truth is, I say (mostly) nice things about it because it's the best choice of mobile OSs for the things *I* want out of a mobile OS, but I also realise that it won't be the best match for everyone. What features are better implemented in WinMo? All of them and none of them. It just depends on how each individual user prefers a feature to work. WinMo ticks more boxes for me than anything else, whereas the iPhone ticks more boxes for my wife than WinMo (she's been a WinMo user as long as I have, we started off with his and hers SPV E200's back in the days when Orange were the dogs danglies for mobile data contracts - oh, how times have changed...), and both of them ticked FAR more boxes for her than Android did (after attempting to get to grips with a G1, to say she was less than impressed with both the hardware and the OS would be an understatement of intergalactic proportions).

I think one of the biggest problems the iPhone has is that it's an Apple device, and as such it has to carry around the cult of Apple baggage, which puts off quite a few people. I'll be honest, there are times when I'm sick and tired of the way Apple pushes its products as if they're the best things since sliced bread, conveniently ignoring any other products that might have already been there, done that, and worn the t-shirt so often it's now in danger of falling apart. I'm also far from impressed with their control-freakish nature - any company that can make Microsoft seem like a paragon of open-ness must be doing something seriously wrong...

The iPhone *is* a beautiful piece of kit, both hardware and OS, it just isn't the right system for me. WinMo on a TouchPro, despite the flaws, is. It's as simple as that.

I am lucky!!

I may never have won the lottery but it seems in all the years ive been using Microsoft products on mobile devices ive really never had a problem....thats right, im the luckest person alive, only time ive hard reset is when a 3rd part app crashes and last time that happened was some point last year whilst i was messing about on it. I mean, i must be trully blessed because EVERYONE knows Windows Mobile sucks, everything Microsoft makes is rubbish. But still, Im able to do all sorts of things....at the same time, very quickly and it doesnt crash, my god, how can that be? it just works, and with the lastest updates available it looks better than android and runs faster than the Iphone. AND, get this, i can install pretty much anything i like on it on any network, Wow, someone should just pay me £1000 and ill send you this wonderful device, my Touch HD is about to make me a fortune, then ill buy another one and give it the Darren Treatment and flog that for a grand too and so on...

OK, this iphone update is good, well done for playing catch up to what i alone (apparently) have had access to for the last 5 years or so, without any issues, but it still doesnt work, oh well then, well done apple, maybe next time huh?.

WM 6.5

seems more of an upgrade than this iPhone update! Runs fast, smooth and just the way i like. Never have to use the stylus, and if you actually understand the reason behind having a Resistive stylus capable screen over a capacitive no stylus capability screen then you would understand. WinMo is V big in Asia where people use the stylus to write using the transcribing function. It can even understand MY handwriting (I find it hard to read).

Mac Phreak has been the highlight of my day.

Some people never learn

>> >Why the hell can't I sync Notes on my iPhone to Notes on my Mac and vice versa? Utterly stupid having two different systems which don't talk to each other.

>> Because you're being dumb? It's all there. Are you looking at Stickies on your desktop, not Notes in mail or something?

>How am I being 'dumb'? I have notes in Apple Mail. I have notes in Notes on my iPhone. There is no overlap between the two. They are completely separate systems. There is no facility in MobileMe to sync these two things to each other. There ought to be.

You are being dumb because you are describing the pre-3.0 operation in a discussion about 3.0. I wasn't expecting it, but following a sync this morning all of my Apple Mail notes appeared on my iPhone and vice versa.

@Chris 72

So I have to use an SD card to store all my contacts, text, email and data settinfg on then? That's shit. The Touch and Tytn (the two phone models that I owned) had a pitiful 128MB of "persistant memory" - requiring me to buy an SD card to make sure that data was not lost. If the battery ran out of power - batteries do that occasionally - the settings, ie modem settings, mail client settings et c. would disappear. Microsoft officially state that there should be "enough for 72 hours of storage". Never - 72 seconds, maybe. Have they fixed it then? It didn't seem to work when I had them...

I never said OR intemated that WinMo's Copy and Paste paradigm wasn't intuative - that's your own feeling of inadequacy filling blanks that weren't there. But here's an interesting point of debate - moving the GUI paradign forward towards mobile platforms. With Windows Mobile, Microsoft tried to do that literally, and IMHO failed. The interfaces has always been cluttered and busy. The point that I was making to AC is that the Copy and Paste paradigm Apple have developed for the device works extremely well.

Fair enough on the signal strength, but IMHO O2 take an unfair bashing here. With Orange, I was lucky if I got a 3G signal in central London, or Birmingham for that matter. I have *never* had a problem with iPhone OR O2.

iTunes works a treat on the Mac platform, and to be honest, I've not had any problems with it on Windows. ActiiveSync on the other hand, what a crock of shit. Outlook? Bag of wank.

Apps on mobile devices. I can count the times on precisely NO hands the amount of times I used mobile Word or Excel. They are useless IMHO. Also the iPod functionallity works whilst I compose messages or browse thy web (on a browser thaht allows *multiple* windows too). as for your comment "Or how about being able to kick off the delivery of a large MMS/email and then go do something else without having to wait for the message to be sent?" I'm able to do that on my iPhone just fine, ta. Have you looked at or used yor wifes iPhone at all?

We agree on something - choice (and therefore competition) is a good thing, but that's where it ends. The iPhone is an extremely capable device. The (free) ssh app on my iPhone is great for accessing servers - there is a VNC app form doing the same if you need to use a GUI. I can do lots of things on my iPhone - like writing some of these post - I've all but abandoned using email on my desktop. WinMo *isn't* the only device capable of being useful - the reason for my original post.

If WinMo works for you then all power to you. I didn't for me. It might tick all the feature boxes - but for me the majority are poorly implemented or relient on old technology/paradigms (Ie; sylus' - something *else* to loose. Or slide out keyboards - another thing that breaks).

As for the last part - not liking something *purely* because of your percieved prejudices is small minded and blinkered, and frankly childish. You bang on about 'merit' and then write that? You have the chutzpa to insinuate that I'm an fanboy - pot, meet kettle. So Apple aren't allowed to market their stuff now? Are they not allowed to apply quality control to products that carry their brand. 9 years ago, they nearly went bankrupt. They had too many bad products and a clone market that was killing them. They have worked really hard to build the business back up to where it is now, which has been done largly on merit. As for Microsoft being a "paragon of openess", have they released *their* internal API's to the Windows developer comunity then? Didn't think so.

It would appear that I touched raw nevre. Were you the AC that wrote his story about being "down the pub" with his "mate"?

Long deleted emails back from the dead.

One thing I noticed was that the new search function seems to find all the emails I've deleted since I bought the phone. Most people would expect things to no longer exist after the trash bin is emptied, but not Apple.

Landscape Texting: Yay or Nay?

I am finding the landscape texting mode to be less useful than the standard ("portait"?) orientation. In portrait mode, the multiline conversation bubbles take about 4/5ths the width of the screen, which is fine. But landscape mode does not resize these bubbles; they take up only about half of the screen width. Therefore, with the keyboard is visible, you'll probably have to scroll to read the last message in its entirety, unless it's less than about 100 characters. This is a big oversight, in my opinion.

@Mac Phreak

"So I have to use an SD card to store all my contacts, text, email and data settinfg on then? That's shit. The Touch and Tytn (the two phone models that I owned) had a pitiful 128MB of "persistant memory" - requiring me to buy an SD card to make sure that data was not lost. If the battery ran out of power - batteries do that occasionally - the settings, ie modem settings, mail client settings et c. would disappear."

I have to ask, did you *really* own either of those devices? Because the T-Mobile branded version of the Tytn my wife owned never lost data due to a loss of power. And neither should the Touch. Why not? Because they both run on newer versions of WinMo, versions which mandate the use of persistent storage for all of the stuff you claim would disappear.

"Microsoft officially state that there should be "enough for 72 hours of storage". Never - 72 seconds, maybe. Have they fixed it then? It didn't seem to work when I had them..."

Where do they state that in relation to WM5 or above? This 72 hour requirement was part of earlier versions of WinMo, none of which would have been installed on the two devices you mention.

"Apps on mobile devices. I can count the times on precisely NO hands the amount of times I used mobile Word or Excel. They are useless IMHO."

Yes, in YOUR opinion. In my opinion, or in the opinion of countless others who do genuinely find having such apps in your pocket at all times, they're anything but. Just as you seem to think MMS is useless when you can simply email photos to people, ignoring the point that many people use phones without email capabilities but which are MMS enabled, or that MMS is pointless because you've yet to see a phone camera worth taking photos with (ever tried the LG Viewty or similar? They're damn close to being compact cameras with phone functionality tagged on, rather than a phone with a camera). In YOUR seemingly narrow view of the mobile world, the iPhone is all you seem to need, but it's a big wide world out there and not everyone subscribes to the "if it's not in the iPhone, no-one really needs it anyway" mindset.

"Also the iPod functionallity works whilst I compose messages or browse thy web (on a browser thaht allows *multiple* windows too). as for your comment "Or how about being able to kick off the delivery of a large MMS/email and then go do something else without having to wait for the message to be sent?" I'm able to do that on my iPhone just fine, ta. Have you looked at or used yor wifes iPhone at all?"

Yes, I have. Which is my point - in order to achieve these basic abilities, without which the iPhone would truly be a pile of cack, it needs to be able to multitask. So why do you think multitasking is such a bad thing to open up to the user?

Multi-window browsing eh. Most HTC devices now ship with Opera, and there are various other free/payware browsers to choose from, which offer tabbed browsing - so we'll call that even shall we...

"As for the last part - not liking something *purely* because of your percieved prejudices is small minded and blinkered, and frankly childish."

So you're saying Apple don't sometimes overstate or misrepresent the capabilities of their products? The ASA would beg to differ with you here. Or that Apple don't exert a significant level of control over what owners are allowed to do with their own property? They're neither perceived nor prejudices, simply personal opinion based on fact.

"You have the chutzpa to insinuate that I'm an fanboy - pot, meet kettle."

I post using my real name, you post as Mac Phreak... I don't need to insinuate anything, you're doing a damn good job of that all by yourself. And I'm no fanboy, I use whatever device suits my needs, which is why there's a well-used iPod Classic sat next to me. I can appreciate the quality of their products without needing to like the way they do business, can't I?

"So Apple aren't allowed to market their stuff now? Are they not allowed to apply quality control to products that carry their brand."

Of course they can market, but they have a habit of consistently bending the truth to suggest their products are better than the rest, and that's not allowed. If their products are genuinely good - and as I've said plenty of times, I think they mostly are - they'd sell themselves without any hype. Hell, these days the cult of Apple is so strong, just slapping the Apple logo on something will guarantee sales figures most manufacturers would kill for, they simply don't need to do anything more than basic "here's our new product, available from Monday" advertising.

As for QC, I don't have a problem with them shipping only carefully configured devices and only officially sanctioning/supporting Apple-tested apps. It's when they start restricting the abilities of end users to try moving outside that walled garden (orchard?) that I think they need to loosen up a bit. How many iPhone users have ended up going down the jailbreak route because of Apple's over-protective stance?

"As for Microsoft being a "paragon of openess", have they released *their* internal API's to the Windows developer comunity then? Didn't think so."

I didn't say Microsoft were open, just that compared to Apple, and from the perspective of an end-user, their products seem to/actually do offer more freedom and open-ness.

"It would appear that I touched raw nevre. Were you the AC that wrote his story about being "down the pub" with his "mate"?"

No, I've never felt the need to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. And I can't remember the last time I set foot in a pub...

@Some people never learn

> >How am I being 'dumb'? I have notes in Apple Mail. I have notes in Notes on my iPhone. There is no overlap between the two. They are completely separate systems. There is no facility in MobileMe to sync these two things to each other. There ought to be.

> You are being dumb because you are describing the pre-3.0 operation in a discussion about 3.0. I wasn't expecting it, but following a sync this morning all of my Apple Mail notes appeared on my iPhone and vice versa.

No, YOU are being dumb because you didn't read what I wrote, specifically the word 'MobileMe'. Days might go by in which I don't connect my phone to my Mac with the cable, so syncing over the cable is no use to me at all. I want wireless syncing of Notes and To Do Items to my iPhone over MobileMe, and for the price I'm paying for my iPhone plus $99 a year for MobileMe I should bloody well have it by now. That is why this update is disappointing for me.

@Chris 72

I can't be bothered. Calling me a liar, saying that *I'm* hiding behind anonymity, Chris 72? Pathetic. My Tytn (SVP M3100 - actually made worse with Orange "customisations") with it's pesristent memory was a pile of junk , both in terms of build quality AND operation. That was my experience. Yours has obviously been better. Well done you. Do you want a fucking medal? All camera phones are shit - yes, even the LG's. Why? Simple physics. It seem that whatever is done to, added to, or even *invented for* the iPhone won't be good enough. I stand by everything I said - especially YOUR blinkered views towards Apple products. Your whole tirade was about using the best tool for the job - so long as it isn't Apple. Your loss.

@All the Pissy People posting

Get a life, you aren't all that interesting nor as important as you think you are. Put down the mouse or most likely the xbox controller, open the door and go out and take a walk in the real world for a change.